OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Monitoring Sustainable Global Development Along Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Sustainable global development is one of the most prevalent challenges facing the world today, hinging on the equilibrium between socioeconomic growth and environmental sustainability. We propose approaches to monitor and quantify sustainable development along the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), including mathematically derived scoring algorithms, and machine learning methods. These integrate socioeconomic and environmental datasets, to produce an interpretable metric for SSP alignment. An initial study demonstrates promising results, laying the groundwork for the application of different methods to the monitoring of sustainable global development.
Approximate Caching for Efficiently Serving Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-to-image generation using diffusion models has seen explosive popularity owing to their ability in producing high quality images adhering to text prompts. However, production-grade diffusion model serving is a resource intensive task that not only require high-end GPUs which are expensive but also incurs considerable latency. In this paper, we introduce a technique called approximate-caching that can reduce such iterative denoising steps for an image generation based on a prompt by reusing intermediate noise states created during a prior image generation for similar prompts. Based on this idea, we present an end to end text-to-image system, Nirvana, that uses the approximate-caching with a novel cache management-policy Least Computationally Beneficial and Frequently Used (LCBFU) to provide % GPU compute savings, 19.8% end-to-end latency reduction and 19% dollar savings, on average, on two real production workloads. We further present an extensive characterization of real production text-to-image prompts from the perspective of caching, popularity and reuse of intermediate states in a large production environment.
GSGFormer: Generative Social Graph Transformer for Multimodal Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Pedestrian trajectory prediction, vital for selfdriving cars and socially-aware robots, is complicated due to intricate interactions between pedestrians, their environment, and other Vulnerable Road Users. This paper presents GSGFormer, an innovative generative model adept at predicting pedestrian trajectories by considering these complex interactions and offering a plethora of potential modal behaviors. We incorporate a heterogeneous graph neural network to capture interactions between pedestrians, semantic maps, and potential destinations. The Transformer module extracts temporal features, while our novel CVAE-Residual-GMM module promotes diverse behavioral modality generation. Through evaluations on multiple public datasets, GSGFormer not only outperforms leading methods with ample data but also remains competitive when data is limited.
Hierarchical Spatio-temporal Decoupling for Text-to-Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Despite diffusion models having shown powerful abilities to generate photorealistic images, generating videos that are realistic and diverse still remains in its infancy. One of the key reasons is that current methods intertwine spatial content and temporal dynamics together, leading to a notably increased complexity of text-to-video generation (T2V). In this work, we propose HiGen, a diffusion model-based method that improves performance by decoupling the spatial and temporal factors of videos from two perspectives, i.e., structure level and content level. At the structure level, we decompose the T2V task into two steps, including spatial reasoning and temporal reasoning, using a unified denoiser. Specifically, we generate spatially coherent priors using text during spatial reasoning and then generate temporally coherent motions from these priors during temporal reasoning. At the content level, we extract two subtle cues from the content of the input video that can express motion and appearance changes, respectively. These two cues then guide the model's training for generating videos, enabling flexible content variations and enhancing temporal stability. Through the decoupled paradigm, HiGen can effectively reduce the complexity of this task and generate realistic videos with semantics accuracy and motion stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of HiGen over the state-of-the-art T2V methods.
The Open Review-Based (ORB) dataset: Towards Automatic Assessment of Scientific Papers and Experiment Proposals in High-Energy Physics
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

With the Open Science approach becoming important for research, the evolution towards open scientific-paper reviews is making an impact on the scientific community. However, there is a lack of publicly available resources for conducting research activities related to this subject, as only a limited number of journals and conferences currently allow access to their review process for interested parties. In this paper, we introduce the new comprehensive Open Review-Based dataset (ORB); it includes a curated list of more than 36,000 scientific papers with their more than 89,000 reviews and final decisions. We gather this information from two sources: the OpenReview.net and SciPost.org websites. However, given the volatile nature of this domain, the software infrastructure that we introduce to supplement the ORB dataset is designed to accommodate additional resources in the future. The ORB deliverables include (1) Python code (interfaces and implementations) to translate document data and metadata into a structured and high-level representation, (2) an ETL process (Extract, Transform, Load) to facilitate the automatic updates from defined sources and (3) data files representing the structured data. The paper presents our data architecture and an overview of the collected data along with relevant statistics. For illustration purposes, we also discuss preliminary Natural-Language-Processing-based experiments that aim to predict (1) papers' acceptance based on their textual embeddings, and (2) grading statistics inferred from embeddings as well. We believe ORB provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in open science and review, with our implementation easing the use of this data for further analysis and experimentation. We plan to update ORB as the field matures as well as introduce new resources even more fitted to dedicated scientific domains such as High-Energy Physics.
FedBayes: A Zero-Trust Federated Learning Aggregation to Defend Against Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning has created a decentralized method to train a machine learning model without needing direct access to client data. The main goal of a federated learning architecture is to protect the privacy of each client while still contributing to the training of the global model. However, the main advantage of privacy in federated learning is also the easiest aspect to exploit. Without being able to see the clients' data, it is difficult to determine the quality of the data. By utilizing data poisoning methods, such as backdoor or label-flipping attacks, or by sending manipulated information about their data back to the server, malicious clients are able to corrupt the global model and degrade performance across all clients within a federation. Our novel aggregation method, FedBayes, mitigates the effect of a malicious client by calculating the probabilities of a client's model weights given to the prior model's weights using Bayesian statistics. Our results show that this approach negates the effects of malicious clients and protects the overall federation.
Cluster Shift Keying: Covert Transmission of Information via Cluster Synchronization in Chaotic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

A network of chaotic systems can be designed in such a way that the cluster patterns formed by synchronous nodes can be controlled through the coupling parameters. We present a novel approach to exploit such a network for covert communication purposes, where controlled clusters encode the symbols spatio-temporally. The cluster synchronization network is divided into two subnetworks as transmitter and receiver. First, we specifically design the network whose controlled parameters reside in the transmitter. Second, we ensure that the nodes of the links connecting the transmitter and receiver are not in the same clusters for all the control parameters. The former condition ensures that the control parameters changed at the transmitter change the whole clustering scheme. The second condition enforces the transmitted signals are always continuous and chaotic. Hence, the transmitted signals are not modulated by the information directly, but distributed over the links connecting the subnetworks. The information cannot be deciphered by eavesdropping on the channel links without knowing the network topology. The performance has been assessed by extensive simulations of bit error rates under noisy channel conditions.
Formalization of Robot Collision Detection Method based on Conformal Geometric Algebra
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Cooperative robots can significantly assist people in their productive activities, improving the quality of their works. Collision detection is vital to ensure the safe and stable operation of cooperative robots in productive activities. As an advanced geometric language, conformal geometric algebra can simplify the construction of the robot collision model and the calculation of collision distance. Compared with the formal method based on conformal geometric algebra, the traditional method may have some defects which are difficult to find in the modelling and calculation. We use the formal method based on conformal geometric algebra to study the collision detection problem of cooperative robots. This paper builds formal models of geometric primitives and the robot body based on the conformal geometric algebra library in HOL Light. We analyse the shortest distance between geometric primitives and prove their collision determination conditions. Based on the above contents, we construct a formal verification framework for the robot collision detection method. By the end of this paper, we apply the proposed framework to collision detection between two single-arm industrial cooperative robots. The flexibility and reliability of the proposed framework are verified by constructing a general collision model and a special collision model for two single-arm industrial cooperative robots.
All Polarized but Still Different: a Multi-factorial Metric to Discriminate between Polarization Behaviors on Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Online polarization has attracted the attention of researchers for many years. Its effects on society are a cause for concern, and the design of personalized depolarization strategies appears to be a key solution. Such strategies should rely on a fine and accurate measurement, and a clear understanding of polarization behaviors. However, the literature still lacks ways to characterize them finely. We propose GRAIL, the first individual polarization metric, relying on multiple factors. GRAIL assesses these factors through entropy and is based on an adaptable Generalized Additive Model. We evaluate the proposed metric on a Twitter dataset related to the highly controversial debate about the COVID-19 vaccine. Experiments confirm the ability of GRAIL to discriminate between polarization behaviors. To go further, we provide a finer characterization and explanation of the identified behaviors through an innovative evaluation framework.
Deep Emotions Across Languages: A Novel Approach for Sentiment Propagation in Multilingual WordNets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Sentiment analysis involves using WordNets enriched with emotional metadata, which are valuable resources. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and expensive, resulting in only a few WordNet Lexical Units being annotated. This paper introduces two new techniques for automatically propagating sentiment annotations from a partially annotated WordNet to its entirety and to a WordNet in a different language: Multilingual Structured Synset Embeddings (MSSE) and Cross-Lingual Deep Neural Sentiment Propagation (CLDNS). We evaluated the proposed MSSE+CLDNS method extensively using Princeton WordNet and Polish WordNet, which have many inter-lingual relations. Our results show that the MSSE+CLDNS method outperforms existing propagation methods, indicating its effectiveness in enriching WordNets with emotional metadata across multiple languages. This work provides a solid foundation for large-scale, multilingual sentiment analysis and is valuable for academic research and practical applications.
A Learning-based Distributed Algorithm for Scheduling in Multi-hop Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

We address the joint problem of learning and scheduling in multi-hop wireless network without a prior knowledge on link rates. Previous scheduling algorithms need the link rate information, and learning algorithms often require a centralized entity and polynomial complexity. These become a major obstacle to develop an efficient learning-based distributed scheme for resource allocation in large-scale multi-hop networks. In this work, by incorporating with learning algorithm, we develop provably efficient scheduling scheme under packet arrival dynamics without a priori link rate information. We extend the results to distributed implementation and evaluation their performance through simulations.
The Graph Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Informative Graph Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph learning methods help utilize implicit relationships among data items, thereby reducing training label requirements and improving task performance. However, determining the optimal graph structure for a particular learning task remains a challenging research problem. In this work, we introduce the Graph Lottery Ticket (GLT) Hypothesis - that there is an extremely sparse backbone for every graph, and that graph learning algorithms attain comparable performance when trained on that subgraph as on the full graph. We identify and systematically study 8 key metrics of interest that directly influence the performance of graph learning algorithms. Subsequently, we define the notion of a "winning ticket" for graph structure - an extremely sparse subset of edges that can deliver a robust approximation of the entire graph's performance. We propose a straightforward and efficient algorithm for finding these GLTs in arbitrary graphs. Empirically, we observe that performance of different graph learning algorithms can be matched or even exceeded on graphs with the average degree as low as 5.
Parallel Repetition of k-Player Projection Games
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

We study parallel repetition of k-player games where the constraints satisfy the projection property. We prove exponential decay in the value of a parallel repetition of projection games with value less than 1.
Navigating the Path of Women in Software Engineering: From Academia to Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Context. Women remain significantly underrepresented in software engineering, leading to a lasting gender gap in the software industry. This disparity starts in education and extends into the industry, causing challenges such as hostile work environments and unequal opportunities. Addressing these issues is crucial for fostering an inclusive and diverse software engineering workforce. Aim. This study aims to enhance the literature on women in software engineering, exploring their journey from academia to industry and discussing perspectives, challenges, and support. We focus on Brazilian women to extend existing research, which has largely focused on North American and European contexts. Method. In this study, we conducted a cross-sectional survey, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, focusing on women's experiences in software engineering to explore their journey from university to the software industry. Findings. Our findings highlight persistent challenges faced by women in software engineering, including gender bias, harassment, work-life imbalance, undervaluation, low sense of belonging, and impostor syndrome. These difficulties commonly emerge from university experiences and continue to affect women throughout their entire careers. Conclusion. In summary, our study identifies systemic challenges in women's software engineering journey, emphasizing the need for organizational commitment to address these issues. We provide actionable recommendations for practitioners.
Using Program Knowledge Graph to Uncover Software Vulnerabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In an increasingly interconnected and data-driven world, the importance of robust security measures cannot be overstated. A knowledge graph constructed with information extracted from the system along with the desired security behavior can be utilized to identify complex security vulnerabilities hidden underneath the systems. Unfortunately, existing security knowledge graphs are constructed from coarse-grained information extracted from publicly available vulnerability reports, which are not equipped to check actual security violations in real-world system implementations. In this poster, we present a novel approach of using Program Knowledge Graph that is embedded with fine-grained execution information of the systems (e.g., callgraph, data-flow, etc.) along with information extracted from the public vulnerability and weakness datasets (e.g., CVE and CWE). We further demonstrate that our custom security knowledge graph can be checked against the standard queries generated by LLM, providing a powerful way to identify security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in critical systems.
Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations for Data-Efficient No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

No-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) is an important tool in enhancing the user experience in diverse visual applications. A major drawback of state-of-the-art NR-IQA techniques is their reliance on a large number of human annotations to train models for a target IQA application. To mitigate this requirement, there is a need for unsupervised learning of generalizable quality representations that capture diverse distortions. We enable the learning of low-level quality features agnostic to distortion types by introducing a novel quality-aware contrastive loss. Further, we leverage the generalizability of vision-language models by fine-tuning one such model to extract high-level image quality information through relevant text prompts. The two sets of features are combined to effectively predict quality by training a simple regressor with very few samples on a target dataset. Additionally, we design zero-shot quality predictions from both pathways in a completely blind setting. Our experiments on diverse datasets encompassing various distortions show the generalizability of the features and their superior performance in the data-efficient and zero-shot settings. Code will be made available at https://github.com/suhas-srinath/GRepQ.
FREDSum: A Dialogue Summarization Corpus for French Political Debates
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved the performance of abstractive summarization systems. The majority of research has focused on written documents, however, neglecting the problem of multi-party dialogue summarization. In this paper, we present a dataset of French political debates for the purpose of enhancing resources for multi-lingual dialogue summarization. Our dataset consists of manually transcribed and annotated political debates, covering a range of topics and perspectives. We highlight the importance of high quality transcription and annotations for training accurate and effective dialogue summarization models, and emphasize the need for multilingual resources to support dialogue summarization in non-English languages. We also provide baseline experiments using state-of-the-art methods, and encourage further research in this area to advance the field of dialogue summarization. Our dataset will be made publicly available for use by the research community.
SYSFLOW: Efficient Execution Platform for IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional executable delivery models pose challenges for IoT devices with limited storage, necessitating the download of complete executables and dependencies. Network solutions like NFS, designed for data files, encounter high IO overhead for irregular access patterns. This paper introduces SYSFLOW, a lightweight network-based executable delivery system for IoT. SYSFLOW delivers on-demand, redirecting local disk IO to the server through optimized network IO. To optimize cache hit rates, SYSFLOW employs server-side action-based prefetching, reducing latency by 45.1% to 75.8% compared to native Linux filesystems on SD cards. In wired environments, SYSFLOW's latency is up to 67.7% lower than NFS. In wireless scenarios, SYSFLOW performs 22.9% worse than Linux, comparable with Linux and outperforming NFS by up to 60.7%. While SYSFLOW's power consumption may be 6.7% higher than NFS, it offers energy savings due to lower processing time.
Interpretable Underwater Diver Gesture Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, usage and applications of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles has grown rapidly. Interaction of divers with the AUVs remains an integral part of the usage of AUVs for various applications and makes building robust and efficient underwater gesture recognition systems extremely important. In this paper, we propose an Underwater Gesture Recognition system trained on the Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy Underwater gesture dataset using deep learning that achieves 98.01\% accuracy on the dataset, which to the best of our knowledge is the best performance achieved on this dataset at the time of writing this paper. We also improve the Gesture Recognition System Interpretability by using XAI techniques to visualize the model's predictions.
Understanding Community Bias Amplification in Graph Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we discover a phenomenon of community bias amplification in graph representation learning, which refers to the exacerbation of performance bias between different classes by graph representation learning. We conduct an in-depth theoretical study of this phenomenon from a novel spectral perspective. Our analysis suggests that structural bias between communities results in varying local convergence speeds for node embeddings. This phenomenon leads to bias amplification in the classification results of downstream tasks. Based on the theoretical insights, we propose random graph coarsening, which is proved to be effective in dealing with the above issue. Finally, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning model called Random Graph Coarsening Contrastive Learning (RGCCL), which utilizes random coarsening as data augmentation and mitigates community bias by contrasting the coarsened graph with the original graph. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method when dealing with community bias amplification.